Category: observations

design observations product packaging

Finally! Feminine Hygiene Products Become More Environmentally Friendly

By Mary | by Mary

While grocery shopping at Walmart recently, I found a significant change in the feminine hygiene products section. Can you spot a theme?         There is an entire section of environmentally-friendly feminine products … finally! Of course there were still plenty of the standard products made with all sorts of plastics, but I’ve never seen feminine hygiene products sold on the basis of significant portions of them being 100-percent organic cotton let alone…

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challenge history ideas observations pragmatic historian

A Social Contract of Care and Concern

By Mary | by Mary

  I found the above story on Twitter. It is attributed to anthropologist Margaret Mead as told to Ira Byock. It relates how Mead felt that the first sign of civilization within a culture was finding a broken femur that had healed, indicating that someone had taken the time to allow an injured person to heal by protecting and caring for them. It’s an interesting story, though the tweet has since been removed, probably because…

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design observations preservation

The Humidifier Poorly Designed for the Fussiness It Requires

By Mary | by Mary

The older I get, the more annoyed I become with poor design. Age may be part of that annoyance in that the body is simply not as capable as it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago. I’m finding it harder to lift things and my grip is not as strong. We recently purchased a new humidifier because our other one stopped releasing mist, which is a bad thing for a humidifier. In comparing box…

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inspiration observations

With Abandon

By Mary | by Mary

Today’s my birthday and blogging has taken a back seat to chatting with family and hanging out with my husband on a fall colors drive. The colors in Central Minnesota around our many lakes are particularly vibrant this year. Sorry, no pics. I was too busy enjoying the drive. I have kept this quick, lighthearted blog post in my back pocket for a few weeks now, waiting for a moment when I wanted to deploy…

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history ideas observations pragmatic historian preservation work in progress

Embodied Energy Is Key to the Grand Unified Theory of Preservation

By Mary | by Mary

Big, complex ideas take a significant amount of thought. Such is the case with the Grand Unified Theory of Preservation I’ve been working on for years. The thinking has continued since I shared the post I wrote about the theory a couple of weeks ago on this blog. Friend and history colleague David Grabitske sparked fresh thinking about the theory with a question he left on LinkedIn: “Where does Language Preservation fit? Just curious.“ Yes,…

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